Some criticisms of empiricism from a phenomenological standpoint, with special reference to the work of Husserl and Sartre

Abstract

The standpoint from which my criticisms of empiricist philosophy are made is phenomenological, in the sense given to that word by Husserl. But it is much closer to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty than to the master. In particular, reflexive analysis in my terms concerns experience of things in the world and does not put in parenthesis the question of their existence or reality. The thesis of the world, or in Hume's terms, the natural belief in the independent existence of the world , is in my view primordial, unthinking, unreasoned, and inseparable from our being embodied subjects. The form in which I expound phenomenological doctrines is determined by the arguments of the empiricist philosophers by which I have taken for discussion. It i s a critique of empiricism and not of phenomenology.